What We’re Reading This Summer

People reading books in the sun drinking Pia colada
Illustration by Ana Galvañ
“Picture,” by Lillian Ross

Lillian Ross’s “Picture,” originally published in 1952 and now happily reissued by the New York Review Books Classics imprint, is an immensely enjoyable work about the immensely unenjoyable process of making a Hollywood movie. In the book’s five chapters—first published, in this magazine, as a series of long-form articles—Ross writes, with great subtlety and humor, about the production of John Huston’s “The Red Badge of Courage,” based on Stephen Crane’s Civil War novel. Ross reported the story for a year and a half, largely from Los Angeles and its environs, and was given envy-inducing access, the kind a writer would rarely get today, to its central players. The narrative arc she draws is satisfyingly comprehensive. It proceeds from Huston’s efforts to convince M-G-M’s shrewd leader, Louis B. Mayer—described, deliciously, as one whose “large head seems set upon the shoulders without an intervening neck”—to produce the movie, which the executive considered a pretentious would-be failure, to the movie’s difficult shoot in California. We also witness the baroque power struggles during its editing and promotion between, on one side, Huston and the movie’s producer, a European of fine sensibility named Gottfried Reinhardt, both of whom wanted to make “a great picture,” and, on the other, Mayer and Dore Schary, the studio’s upbeat, market-minded production head, who wanted the movie to entertain the masses. It is only one of the book’s many ironies that the making of “Badge” proves not dissimilar to the war Crane and, after him, Huston wished to portray: cruel, relentless, ultimately meaningless. It is another that the studio’s attempts to improve the movie’s chances at the box office by reëditing it make it, in the end, neither great nor successful: “an unartistic flop,” in the words of Reinhardt. While the roguishly charming Huston is the book’s purported protagonist, it is Reinhardt who garners our deepest sympathies: at first in his fight against the studio executives’ commercial imperatives and, later, in his capitulation to them.Naomi Fry

“Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead,” by Olga Tokarczuk

In the opening sentence of the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk’s “Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead,” Janina, the novel’s unflappably independent and eccentric sixtysomething protagonist, announces, “I am already at an age and additionally in a state where I must always wash my feet thoroughly before bed, in the event of having to be removed by an ambulance in the Night.” (The book, which was originally published in 2009, was recently translated into English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.) Janina lives in a Polish village, close to the border of the Czech Republic, and she’s vaguely ill. Maybe “he who suffers has special access to God,” she thinks at one point. Her solitary days and nights are spent translating William Blake, constructing complex astrological charts, caring for the summer homes of wealthy neighbors, and keeping a hawk-like eye out for the silent animals that roam the surrounding land. Janina has organized her life around these varied forms of intense and meticulous observation; her mind is fixed to the present but fixated on eternity, and it excludes much of what comes in between. This makes her a wonderful and confounding narrator for a mysterious series of village deaths that make up the plot of “Drive Your Plow.” She hatches a theory—that the local animals are rising up against the people who eat and hunt them. Like Blake, or like an astrologer, or, perhaps, like a deer who intuits the end of her life in the sound of a footstep, Janina understands that the “largest things are contained in the smallest.” She writes long, anonymous letters to the police station, in which she describes the earth-spanning system of cruelty and violence that manifests in what we unthinkingly do. Of course, most of the villagers think Janina is crazy, but they underestimate her. (One of the subterranean questions at the center of the novel’s strangely coherent world: If we saw animals more clearly, if we respected their agency, would we then be able to hold them responsible for murder?) “Drive Your Plow” is exhilarating in a way that feels fierce and private, almost inarticulable; it’s one of the most existentially refreshing novels I’ve read in a long time.Jia Tolentino

“No Visible Bruises,” by Rachel Louise Snyder

I don’t quite understand how Rachel Louise Snyder did what she did in writing “No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us.” The book was nine years in the making, but that can be only part of the explanation for its achievement of depth and breadth. Another part is Snyder’s writing background: as she states in the preface, Snyder has reported from the “hidden corners of the world” about political corruption, war crimes, terrorism, sex trafficking—the big stuff. Domestic violence was often on her horizon as a topic, but it seemed tangential to every story; at some point she realized it was central. (Snyder says that she uses the term “domestic violence” reluctantly—she would prefer “intimate partner terrorism.”) So she has written a book about everything: about men who beat and kill their wives or girlfriends; about people who work to predict murder, and those who try to heal the abusers; and also, deeply, about gender, poverty, depression, despair, privilege, law enforcement, incarceration, justice, mental health, and politics in an age when a known abuser of women occupies the White House and an alleged abuser has recently joined the Supreme Court. It takes a writer of uncommon talent and confidence to pull this off. Snyder’s stories are about people, every single one of whom—including a man who killed his wife and daughter in cold blood—is drawn empathically. Her investigation is intellectual and unsparingly complex. Some of the most surprising material in the book concerns recovery groups for men who have abused women. Snyder transitions seamlessly from describing these to examining the limitations imposed on their work by mass incarceration and the economics of crime and punishment in America. She is clear-eyed about her subjects, yet she manages to avoid a sense of relentless misery. She is even, on occasion, wryly funny. This may not be the most obvious choice for a beach read, but it’s so many (good) books in one that it’s the perfect book to pack for a trip.Masha Gessen

“Famous People,” by Justin Kuritzkes

Two summers ago, I rode the bus to a small theatre in Brooklyn to see a play about a doctor preoccupied with the texture and the emissions of his own asshole. I soon realized that I was in brilliant hands; the scatological surfaces of “Asshole,” a long monologue written by Justin Kuritzkes, harden as the doctor rationalizes his role in a barbaric, government-sponsored experiment. I had been familiar with Kuritzkes’s looping, philosophical humor for a while. At our alma mater, as some of us were drunkenly figuring selfie angles, Kuritzkes was becoming a low-key YouTube star. In his one-man skits, he uses Photo Booth to stretch or squeeze his features, giving wacky physical personalities to his characters. Lately, his comedy has drawn on contemporary culture, and he writes and performs ballads and bangers—“All I Want Is a Fucking Bride,” “Dance All Night with My Wife,” “Fuck Me Back to Life,”—that are so curiously well-honed that a producer could pluck them for a Justin Bieber album. “Girl, the first time I saw you, it was like getting hit with a bullet from a gun,” he croons on the opening lyric of “Falling in Love with a Photograph.” The song’s surprisingly violent absurdism might appeal to the witless narrator of “Famous People,” Kuritzkes’s début novel, which will be published in July. “Famous People” is one monologue, dipped in a vat of vocal fry and ego death, though its narrator, the biggest pop star in the world, thinks that he is writing a god-level memoir. Why wouldn’t he, as every song he releases goes gold, platinum, diamond? Kuritzkes’s star is negotiating the Midas touch of his fame with the suicide of his former manager and father. Tragedy and popularity, the impossibility of parsing them, is always on my mind, as someone who gets paid to slash through the thicket of P.R. teams and A. & R. mavericks with the foolish hope of reaching a sincere message sprung from a singer’s soul. “Famous People” is entertaining and sort of heartbreaking; someone get a copy to Bieber’s agents.Doreen St. Félix

“Out East,” by John Glynn

Summer is the season dedicated to reckless self-discovery, beginning, on the first truly warm day of the year, with a jarring reintroduction to one’s own body: “Hey, my legs!” John Glynn’s lovely memoir, “Out East,” recounts a transformational summer in the Hamptons, during which Glynn began to understand something about whom he might want to love. Glynn, an editorial assistant at a publishing house in Manhattan, is haunted by some vague but devastating sense of unease. He has a supportive, loving family and a boisterous cabal of friends from college, but he has never had a serious, long-term relationship. Dying alone and unloved starts to feel inevitable. At night, he struggles to curtail the anxiety that grips him: “The walls of my bedroom seemed to shrink,” Glynn writes. “The air went still, as if poised to disappear.” In a stroke of serendipity, Glynn inherits a bit of money just as he’s offered a room in a “share house” in Montauk, a remote, party-heavy town on the easternmost end of Long Island. Glynn describes it as “past the point of civilization, a wild, moon-dipped isthmus.” What follows are breathless weekends spent drinking cocktails (“If it was a beach day in Montauk, you got shitfaced. If it wasn’t a beach day in Montauk, you got shitfaced”) and, inevitably, falling deeply, bewilderingly in love with a young man named Matt. Like the best coming-of-age books, “Out East” is a tender, patient how-to manual, sketching a path to self-actualization, or at least to self-acceptance. Glynn is such a warm, elegant, and gorgeously precise writer that, although I’ve never been to the Hamptons, I still felt the dizzying pull of the place: the otherworldly horizons, the shared sense of escape. When he describes his cohort as “sun children chasing an eternal summer,” it evokes not indulgence but a desire for a time and place where it feels possible to find yourself.Amanda Petrusich

“Normal People,” by Sally Rooney

I read Sally Rooney’s novel “Normal People” in a couple of sittings, not by preference—pulling away in the middle was hard. Rooney (the subject of a profile in the magazine, this past January) is Irish, and still in her twenties, and she’s often described as a “millennial novelist” because her novels include texting and Twitter. Yet her work is notable for lacking the usual tics and twitches of precocity; it stretches fruitfully between a young person’s will to accounting and order (Rooney identifies as a Marxist) and the half-lit flux of adult identity. “Normal People” is almost classical in its conceit: Marianne, a rich girl, and Connell, the son of her family’s housecleaner, begin dating in high school (secretly—by his preference, not hers) and follow each other to college, coming apart and together for years as the polarity of their relationship changes. The magic of the story is in Rooney’s writing, which is taut and exacting in emotional description but also low-key, pruned of fussy punctuation, and fluid, like an ice cube losing its hard edges as it melts. She is known for her portraits of relationships between women; it’s a testament to her empathetic imagination that she is also good at writing the interior lives of men. I was grateful for “Normal People” as a fleet, crystalline, and very human novel—a perfect summer book.Nathan Heller

“Inheritance,” by Dani Shapiro

A few years ago, at the age of fifty-four, the writer Dani Shapiro casually took a DNA test to humor her husband and discovered that her beloved father, about whom she had frequently written, was not her biological father at all. “Inheritance,” her latest book, describes the aftermath of that shattering discovery, which boggled her identity and sense of self. Both of Shapiro’s parents were long dead; her biological father, on the other hand, was tracked down online with amazing ease. This narrative hitch—Shapiro solves the mystery of her paternity practically the moment she discovers that there is one—becomes a strength of her engrossing, compassionate memoir, as Shapiro is driven to reckon with questions of heritage, memory, and family that go beyond chromosomes and surnames. Shapiro returns to the territory of her parents’ marriage and her own childhood, which she had covered—or thought she did—in previous books; investigates the murky, unregulated world of mid-century American fertility clinics; and consults a rabbi to try to gain insight into her devout father’s mind. (After a lifetime of being told that she didn’t look Jewish, the blonde, Scandinavian-featured Shapiro, who was raised Orthodox, must admit that the doubters had a point.) This sort of thing is right up my alley; I gobble up the letters to the Times Magazine’s Ethicist that deal with dramatic revelations by DNA, which seem to get more frequent by the month. In the age of genetics and easy data, the great crisis of Greek drama has become pedestrian; we are all Oedipus, potentially. “How had I lived my life without being able to answer that first and most fundamental of all questions: Who am I?” Shapiro writes. There is no easy answer here; as in the best writing on the self, the point is the integrity of her search.Alexandra Schwartz

“Policing the Open Road,” by Sarah Seo

I often think that academic books that aspire to reach non-specialists have a problem distilling what’s actually interesting about their research. This isn’t the case with “Policing the Open Road,” by the legal historian Sarah Seo. Her book is a fascinating examination of how the automobile reconfigured American life, not just in terms of suburbanization and infrastructure but with regard to deeply ingrained notions of freedom and personal identity. The history she recounts touches on everything from conceptions of public and private space—a distinction that, when it comes to cars, was famously parsed by Jay-Z, in “99 Problems”—to the normalization of law enforcement as a feature of everyday life. The legal system is built on stories and the need to find closure, or restitution, when people find themselves at narrative impasses. This is what makes Seo’s book so engrossing: it is filled with riveting, deeply researched accounts of interactions between drivers and cops back when the rules governing such incidents were still hazy. At times, it feels like an underground history—of closeted gay men testing the limits of privacy; of African-Americans, like Jack Johnson or Martin Luther King, Jr., simply trying to get from one place to another. Nowadays, amid controversies around civil forfeiture and “driving while black,” many of us recognize the paradoxes at the heart of the deeply American, and deeply alluring, trope of the open highway. Seo’s book, and the legal cases she carefully reconstructs, suggest that there were other roads we could have gone down.Hua Hsu

“Loudermilk,” by Lucy Ives

Loudermilk,” a new novel by Lucy Ives, is set at a lightly fictionalized Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Ives is either puncturing a myth about Iowa or advancing it; either option makes her book an indulgence. I loved the character of Anton Beans, a “conceptual lyricist” with a baby-bald head and a lush, Abrahamic beard. I loved Don Hillary, the requisite alcoholic professor, who once wrote cowboy poetry and now appears to be “slowly embalming himself as a source of perverse patrician fun.” The book’s title refers to Troy Augustus Loudermilk, who scams his way into the program with the help of his friend Harry. Their division of labor is as follows: Troy, a glorious idiot, goes to class, flaunts his loutish good looks, and tries to sleep with as many coeds as possible; Harry, who is painfully shy, sits in their crumbling apartment—the toilet’s in the center of the floor—and completes Troy’s assignments. The pair’s comic adventures interweave with the more melancholy account of Clare, a first-year fiction writer who can no longer write. Clare, who speaks with a clipped, mysterious precision, is an early indication that Ives’s interests point toward the philosophical, even the mystical. “Loudermilk” is not just funny; it becomes a layered exploration of the creative process, from the “tension that once indicated to [Clare] a beginning” to Harry’s feeling, as he plans a poem, that “he wants to walk backward … The challenge is to get himself to fall.” Ives approaches the students themselves with canny tenderness, and their work (which the novel excerpts, delightfully) with grave respect. Her own language is prickly and odd, with a distracted quality, as if she were trying to narrate while another voice is murmuring in her ear.Katy Waldman

“Giants of the Monsoon Forest,” by Jacob Shell

I hate animals, which is why I am a vegetarian, but I loved Jacob Shell’s book “Giants of the Monsoon Forest,” which is a beautifully written travelogue and ethnography of the centuries-old relationship between humans and logging elephants. Principally set in Southeast Asia, the book is written in a lightly antique mode—“I visited that sylvan country . . . ” Shell writes, of the forest region where he conducted his research—that’s somehow appropriate to this study of vanishing ways of life in a region strafed by nationalist conflict. Like the late Clifford Geertz’s study of cockfighting in Bali, Shell’s examination of elephant riders (called mahouts or oozies, depending on the area) and the social lives of the “giants” themselves reveals a political order, subterranean and anarchic, that goes against the centralizing tendencies of the authoritarian states where these relationships have developed. (One chapter looks at the use of elephants by the Kachin Independence Army in northeastern Myanmar, combatants in the world’s longest-running civil war.) Though, at the end, Shell notes that the “prospects for the Asian elephant are bleak,” with their population dropping precipitously (sixty thousand in 1999; around forty thousand today), he goes through the uses of elephants for relief efforts in flood-prone regions, such as Banda Aceh during the 2004 tsunami. “Investing in elephants to help during floods is the kind of thing that connect elephants’ unique abilities to a set of human needs that is likely to grow in coming years,” he writes. It is a sentence at once hopeful and ominous.Nikil Saval

“Little Boy,” by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the San Francisco poet and City Lights publisher, turned a hundred in March and marked the occasion with “Little Boy,” which calls itself a novel but feels like a mystical memoir. It picks up with its eponymous urchin shuttling, as Ferlinghetti did, between privilege and deprivation, between a boarding school and an orphanage. Later, it flashes a snapshot of Ferlinghetti’s colleagues in the project of Beat literature. (“Ginzy always going for straights whom he loved to convert or at least tried and succeeded sometime suck-seeded.”) It is a memoir that views memory as “an hourglass when you turn it over and all the sands of past life flow down through it mixing recent grains of time with earlier grains all haphazard together in the mix.” It chases recurring dreams across the decade, and it profiles the United States, as a nation and an ideal, such that that there is even charm to its grouching, as if its belches of boho dyspepsia sounded from angelic horns. (Ferlinghetti writes of enlisting in the Navy, just before Pearl Harbor, to fight “for an America that was full of hope full of amiable optimism in a wide-open land still not all bought-and-sold the last frontier still full of promiscuous promise where the pursuit of happiness had not yet turned into a rat race to corner the gelt of the world.”) It’s highly allusive and terminally punning. Its prose accretes the oracular weight of a holy text as it evokes the genesis of Little Boy’s lonely consciousness, and it exempts itself from pedestrian laws of punctuation to support the versifying rhythm. There’s a lot of Gertrude Stein’s mother-earth momentum in the patient ecstasy of its buildups, and many provocative evocations of Shakespeare, Dickens, Twain, Whitman, Faulkner, Proust, Beckett, Faulkner, Djuna Barnes, and, yes, Joyce I said Joyce I will Joyce. Digging into the themes running through his work and the voices running through his head, the author stages a deliberate ramble under gauzy light.Troy Patterson

A previous version of this post misstated the title of “Policing the Open Road.” The name of the translator of “Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead” has been added.